February 28, 2008 - BAT to Acquire Most of Denmark's ST..British American Tobacco (BAT), the world's second-biggest cigarette maker, struck its second deal in a week with the purchase of Skandinavisk Tobakskompagni's (ST) cigarettes for $4.1 billion (2 billion pounds) as it beat forecasts with an 11 percent rise in 2007 earnings. BAT, which agreed to buy Turkey's state-owned cigarette maker Tekel last Friday, is buying 100 percent of the cigarette assets of privately-owned Denmark-based ST with snus and roll-your-own tobacco. The Danish assets that BAT is buying account for 60 percent of cigarette sales in Scandinavia, led by its Prince brand, and the deal will give BAT market leadership in Denmark and Norway, and around a third of the Swedish and Polish cigarette markets. It will add around 30 billion annual cigarette sales to BAT's 684 billion sales in 2007, or around the same size as Tekel's annual sales of 32 billion cigarettes. BAT Chief Executive Paul Adams added that although Scandinavian markets, like other mature European markets, were seeing cigarette volumes declining around 2 percent a year with public place smoking restrictions and high excise tax, the business it was buying was very profitable with high margins. ST units including Prince cigarettes and Fiedler & Lundgren, the Swedish maker of snus powdered tobacco.